A site where a man with far too much interest in beer gets to write about it.

Friday, 27 March 2015

SIBA BeerX 2015

I spent a lot of last week up north. Mainly I was there for the the SIBA conference, or BeerX as they call it, but I did manage to nip over to the Lake District too.

It's not all grim up north

But back to BeerX. I was up there for work, manning a stall and giving some talks. More things I need to get round to writing up at some point.

This year they'd put extra layers of flooring covering the for the exhibition area, which was a relief as I wasn't keen to lose any toes to frostbite. There was a reasonable about of interest at the stall, and my talks went well. The speakers, which included three brewing professors, got taken out for a curry by the IBD. We met up in a pub first and only one of the group blotted their copy book by not choosing cask beer when they had the opportunity. The food at the curry house was good, if slow.

I managed to catch a couple of the professors giving their talks, and I have to say these brewing professors know their stuff. An altogether different affair was the talk by Adrian Tierney-Jones and Roger Protz. After the technical talks this was more like a free form jam session vaguely around the theme of their book. It was chaotic but entertaining, and I enjoyed it immensely, even without taking the free beer into account.

Ah yes, the free beer. By this point I didn't have any more talks to give so I allowed myself to unwind. In fact I kept unwinding until I was put in a taxi at midnight.Along the way we caught a talk by Pete Brown drumming up support for his forthcoming book. The book sounds like it's going be great fun so if I haven't stumped up any money for it yet hurry up.

I did point out where he'd gone wrong about something though, which it seems might make me a bastard. I was only trying to be helpful, honest.

The exhibition finished at noon on the last day, so then it was just packing up and the trip even further north. Via Kempka butchers of course. When you have the chance to get a Yorkshire pork pie it's not to be missed.